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Dland6a some long, sharklike shapes.
"Dark night!" J.B. exclaimed, his fedora nearly falling off the back of his
head in his sudden excite-ment. "Missiles!"
"Not nukes?"
"No, Ryan, probably not. But there's Dragon and Copperhead antitank rockets
there. Must have been overlooked in the last shambles. Launchers. Guid-ance
units. Those are the best, there." He indicated a row of stacked rockets,
around four feet long. "They're TOW Fours."
"What'd they do?" Jak asked.
J.B. closed his eyes and recited from memory. Even though Ryan knew how
encyclopedic the little man's knowledge of weapons was, he was still
impressed.
"TOW Four. Stands for Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missile.
Originally replaced the 106 mm recoilless rifle. Got six wings that come out
in flight. Uses a Hercules motor. Range around three miles. Flight velocity of
675
mph. Carries a fifteen-pound explosive warhead."
"How d'you aim it?" Ryan asked, looking at the greased tubes, still gleaming
behind their locked doors after nearly one hundred useless years.
"Optical sensors in nose. Controls go down twin wires. Helium pressure
actuators.
Nightsight and laserscope. Penetrate any armor anyone had ever seen in those
days. Beautiful. Real beautiful. Who'd have thought I'd ever see one."
Ryan couldn't ever remember hearing the Armorer so enthusiastic about
anything.
Doc coughed and began to move back toward the corridor. "Can we get out of
this death shop, Ryan? I find this " he gestured at the broken metal all
around
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" saddens and sickens me."
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Dland6a
"They're okay if you use 'em right, Doc," J.B. protested.
"There is no right, John Dix. Can you not see this? With the dealing of death
there can only be wrong. Wrong!"
"That could be," Ryan admitted, "but I know that if I'm against a chiller with
a stick, then I'd welcome a bigger stick."
The cut on Jak's arm was hurting him and they stopped off when they passed
what had been a doctor's office, on the way to the entrance. J.B. cleaned and
rebandaged the wound, which seemed to be healing fairly well.
The surgeon was still in his office. From the sprawled position of the
leathery corpse, he must have been leaning back in his swivel chair when he
put the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson between his teeth. The impact had blown
him over, legs resting on the over-turned seat. Lori stared down into the
splintered exit hole in the top of the skull with a morbid fascination.
"Empty," she said.
"Would be, by now," Doc replied.
There was nothing to stay for. The grim Shay Can-yon Redoubt with its flavor
of ancient death was deeply depressing for the six friends. Their backpacks
already held all the self-heats they needed, as well as some emergency water
supplies.
J.B. found some aqua-pure tabs and handed them out. Everyone had sufficient
ammo for their blasters.
There was nothing to stay for.
As they neared the main entrance doors to the re-doubt, they could see a
tattered poster tacked to the wall. It showed a hillside covered with fighting
men, most on horseback, many with hats made from feath-ers. They were
attacking a smaller group of people, who looked like sec men in dark blue
uniforms. They were in a defensive ring, battling against overwhelm-ing odds
and at their center was a tall man with flow-ing yellow hair.
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Dland6a
"Seventh Cavalry fighting against the Sioux," Doc said knowledgeably. "Battle
of the Little Big Horn. The Indians massacred the whites, and served them
right."
The caption on the poster said simply, Custer Died for Our Sins.
Underneath, in spray-can crimson, faded to a pale pink, someone had added a
line: Whose sins are we dying for?
"THREE& FIVE& TWO& " Ryan punched the open code into the control panel at the
side of the massive armored sec doors, and after a fractional delay they began
to slide back.
It had felt warm before. Now they were all struck by a smothering wave of
bright heat and dazzling sun-light.
The twisted waste of red and orange desert stretched limitlessly before them.
Chapter Seven
"NEW MEXICO. OR ARIZONA. Near as I can make it. Close to Utah and
Colorado as well. Sextant isn't that good, and the maps are kind of old."
Apart from rough local sketch plans, Ryan knew that no proper maps, covering
any appreciable area had been drawn since the United States of America ceased.
And became the Deathlands.
The hot desert air was heavy with the scent of sage-brush, mesquite and
creosote.
The sky seemed higher, the horizons farther, in that place of shimmering heat.
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Dland6a
There were vicious streaks of chem clouds, thirty miles or more off to the
east, vivid purple against the glow-ing pink sky.
The doors of the redoubt opened onto a plateau, with the remains of a narrow
blacktop winding to-ward the valley beneath. Remote-control vid-cameras ranged
the area, protruding from the jagged rocky overhang like the stops on a
mission-
hall harmo-nium. The complex was so well hidden by the moun-tain soaring above
it that Ryan guessed it would be virtually impossible to detect from the
flatter desert below.
Now that they were outside, the pointer on the rad counter was flickering on
the line between scarlet and pale orange. It was obvious that the region had
once been a ferocious hot spot, which might, Ryan guessed, account for the
fact that nobody seemed to have tried to break into Shay Canyon Redoubt.
"Was this always desert like this, Doc?" Krysty asked, shading her green eyes
against the lancing sun.
"No. The way I recall it, far north as this was more a kind of dry grasslands.
Near to the prairies. It seems as though the nukings and the long winters must
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